Cirrus@Austlit

'Australian horror films have always had a unique fascination with the continent’s landscape. Though the genre has evolved from the Ozploitation era into more complex territory, it remains moulded by the terra nullius myth and a colonial sense of disconnection from the land. '

'Justin Kurzel’s 2011 film Snowtown opens with a shot of the flat, South Australian countryside from a moving car window. A pulse-like soundtrack scores the scene. After a moment a monotone voice-over begins: a character based on convicted serial killer James Vlassakis narrates a dream he had, which climaxes with the sparse description of a Chihuahua yapping out of a gash from a man’s neck that looks like a ‘big fucking mouth’. This chilling opening sets the tone for the rest of the film: a relentless, suffocating, deeply unsettling fictionalisation of the infamous ‘bodies in the barrels’ serial murders that took place in the northern suburbs of Adelaide between 1992 and 1999, and which culminated in the discovery of eight dismembered bodies submerged in drums of hydrochloric acid, concealed in a disused bank vault in Snowtown, a small town 145 kilometres north of Adelaide.' (Introduction)